Pages

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

FFG has just posted their first preview for James Swallow’s new Tannhauser novel Enigma.

From FFG’s post…

A Weapon of Unthinkable Power

In the dark and war-weary world of Tannhäuser, it’s 1954, and the Great War rages on. Now, the European Reich has developed a weapon of horrific power. The Enigma machine is capable of turning regular civilians into demonic super-soldiers. This device could leave the fate of humanity in the hands of the Reich. Can RAF pilot Nick Cross and Special Agent Caitlin “Hoax” Lambsbury recover the device for the Union?

In January, we announced the release of Enigma, written by James Swallow. Today, we will share a sneak preview of the first chapter, in which the Enigma machine and its horrifying implications are unveiled.

Download the first chapter (pdf, 93 KB), and find yourself drawn into the thrilling Tannhäuser universe. Then, check back soon for the official release of Enigma!

We’re finally going to be getting back to filming soon, and we’re going to get started with some Dust Tactics army lists. But before that I wanted to spend some time discussing my Dust Tactics meta-game philosophy.

I divide army list for most game into three broad categories: Tournament Play, Thematic, and Experimental.

First lets talk about Tournament Play. These army lists are heavily influenced by the current state of the game and the trends in tournaments. For example in the current state of the game being able to “Out Activate” your opponent will go along way toward ensuring a victory. This is why you see so many cheap observer units in champion army lists.

The other thing you might notice in tournament games is the lists are often very infantry heavy. This ties in with the idea of having more activations, but it also allows a player to move through small spaces and enter structures that vehicles could not.

Moving on we have my favorite type the Thematic Army List, which has two sub types the Historical and the Technological. An Historical army list is just what it sounds like, and army meant to resemble an actual military unit. For example if you wanted to make a Dust version of an American armored platoon. You’d want to use three to four medium walkers a couple light walkers, and maybe a heavy walker. Or if you wanted to make an army resembling a German Panzer Grenadier platoon, you’d want to focus on infantry, and have a couple of transports for that infantry.

As you can see the Thematic army is not designed to focus on gameplay strategy alone but give your army a cohesive feel. This holds true of the Technological Army as well, and is perhaps even more true.

In a Technological Army List you build your army around a single piece of unique tech. For the Axis for instance, you can build a 300 point army armed almost entirely with lasers. While lasers can be very powerful they do have their drawbacks. And without any more traditional weapons to counter the lasers shortcoming you are creating a challenge for yourself. In my opinion that’s what makes these types of armies fun, the inherent challenge of overcoming an enemy with not exactly the “best” army can be real fun.

Finally we have the Experimental Army, this is where you try something new. This is usually the result of a new purchase, but it can also come about out of curiosity. Often experimental armies won’t win any tournaments, much like many thematic armies. But this is often a chance to play something you might not otherwise try.

In our upcoming videos we’ll be focusing on Thematic Armies and friendly games, but we’ll be sure mention how many of these fun thematic lists can be adapted to Tournament play. We’ll also try and show off some extremely well rounded armies for each faction that should be able to fight almost any enemy.

The Heroes of Normandie Kickstarter cleared the 100K mark and since that’s in Pounds Sterling that means they’ve made $157,147.38 USD. They still have 53 hours left to go, so who knows how far they’ll make it.

Also we like to announce that HoN will be making its permanent home here on FTE every Thursday, starting in September.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Some folks have already asked if we’ll be doing customs for Heroes of Normandie, the short answer is Yes. The longer answer is we’ll starting with the Tannhauser base characters around which we’ll build two full platoons around 300 points each. But don’t expect to see these completed until after the HoN September launch. Next on our custom list will be expanding the Dust universe offerings for HoN starting with more vehicles.

We do have a sample of what we’re working on, obviously these aren’t done yet. But here is an example of Maj. MacNeal from the Tannhauser base game Union team. With his hero “card”, and the front and back sides of his play token.

Click to enlarge any image.

Over the next few months we’ll be building up our collection of resource files, most of which will need a lot of work. We also don’t want to do too much work on these as the Devil Pig guys are still making changes, and we’re not going to want to do things twice.

Monday, April 22, 2013

The Heroes of Normandie Kickstarter is ending soon, so if any you Dust fans want to get the exclusive Dust mod you need to act fast. We played the demo game last night and found it to be fast paced and simple to pick up. With even only a small number of units and simple scenario the ability to create deep tactical and strategic gameplay was obvious. We’ll have more on the demo game later, get your print and play demo HERE. In the meantime here is a list of all the Dust units that will appear in the Dust Mod. (According to their updates you can double the number of DT units for an additional 15 pounds sterling.) I hope that in the future we’ll see some more DT units make their way to the 15mm cardboard world of HON.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

ABOUT 15MM MINISDear friends, allow me to clarify this for good. :)Olivier and l just LOVE the 1/100 scale and we dream about a game of larger battles for DUST, yes.No, DT and DW scales are not going to change. We stick to our scale and we are already creating the models that will be released in 2015. No worries.But of course we would love to make a new game in the future for use with 1/100 models, this would add a new dimension to our gaming universe but would not be intended to replace the existing one.Plus the walkers in a smaller scale just look sooooo cool ;)We are talking to the RIGHT PEOPLE at the moment, but this does not mean this is happening soon.No changing, no/no.Thanks to all for liking and enjoying our work!P.

This all stems from his mention of DT/DW coming to smaller scales in an interview last month or so. So no worries. But if you can’t wait Dust units will be cominf to the smaller scale (albeit in cardboard cutout form) in Heroes of Normandie, that is of course if you pledge to their Kickstarter.

Friday, April 19, 2013

We finally have a little more work done on our next Zombicide custom. it’s still a little incomplete because I’ve been under the weather so much. But It should give you an better idea of what I’m aiming for.

Dr. Totenkopf has been hard at work in his lab creating the most horrific creation of science ever to step foot in the Apocalypse.

Totenkopf’s Abomination

The Abomination has a number of abilities at Blue Level making it an overpowered beast that will be a challenge for any survivor of zombie to bring down.

At Blue Level and Above the Abomination is considered to have the following skills:

Rotten

Toxic Immunity

Death Grasp

Break In

Further the Abomination may Never preform a Search Action. His special equipment will be posted later.

For targeting priority and damage the Abomination is considered a Bezerker Abomination:

He may not be targeted by ranged attacks

He has the same target priority as a Fatty

And Survivors may only damage him with a weapon damage 3 or higher

I know this beast is a bit overkill, but I wanted something that could be a great “Level Boss” for a campaign I’ll be working on later this summer.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Today we have a nice simple way to increase you Reich’s forces firepower.

The FG-43

The FG-43 is a variant of the infamous MG-42 developed for use by the Fallschirmjäger (The Reich’s elite paratroopers). It was shortened and lightened but maintained an impressive rate of fire exceeding 5000 rounds per minute.

Enjoy.

Side note: I’m still pretty sick so no new videos for a while yet, not till I get my voice back anyway.

… $2,255,018.oo

… with 8,944 Backers

Pretty good for Guillotine Games and CMON. We should be getting our first look at this in September when the regular pledge rewards ship out. Until then we hope to have some more custom stuff for everyone to enjoy.

In other news, updates will still be a little slow here for a while. We should be back up to speed in a week or two.